FORUM:
Studies in Migration Worldwide

Shipping Companies as Carriers and Barriers to Human Mobility:
The Atlantic and Pacific Border Regimes of the United States

Torsten Feys

The
maritime impact on global migration is often overlooked despite the defining
role of oceans on human mobility. Water surfaces initially posed barriers
to migration, directing flows overland. Yet technological innovations turned
rivers, lakes, and oceans into vehicles for all kinds of human interactions,
including migration.1 Networks connecting hinterland and foreland converged in ports and
spurred the exploration of new trade and migratory routes. They increased
the connectedness between maritime and terrestrial life around small seas at
first, then bridged the immensity of the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean from the fifteenth
century. This marks the beginning of a new global era in which oceans no
longer divided the world.2 The transatlantic triangular slave trade established the first long-distance
maritime networks to transport human cargo on a large scale. In its wake,
other forms of indentured and free migration movements developed across the
oceans worldwide. By the 1850s, the stage was set for the age of global
mass migration. Unprecedented mobility resulted from the combination of rising
liberal regimes, steam-driven transport technology, and the demand for labor
spurred by industrialization. Yet the high density of the flow as well as
the growing ethnic diversity drove the major receiving countries to question
the benefits of unrestricted mobility. This age of high imperialism and
accelerated globalization offered a fertile ground for nationalism and eugenics.
The global, cross-border interactions that characterized this era also
contributed to the creation and consolidation of nation-state borders in which
migration control played a central role. The function of the sea as a
barrier was reinstalled, in particular as states integrated private shipping
companies as key actors in their efforts to develop state controls on human
mobility.

This
paradox of turning carriers into barriers of migration in the United States is
the central topic of this article.3 The narrative shows how states tightened their maritime frontier zones
and to what extent these influenced the consolidation of land borders,
installing a control system based on exclusion that spread globally. The rise
of the modern borders, here defined as lines delimiting political units, was
more than a fragmentation of the world into nation-states. As Aristide Zolberg
put it, the system also served to consolidate a world order, as it set "the
first stones of a global wall erected by the rich industrial states to protect
themselves from the 'invasion' by the world's poor."4 Through
world-system analysis, growing attention has been focused on frontier zones, where
two different systems meet: frontiers are considered as areas of interaction
and overlap, in contrast to the border's function of differentiating places.5 Currently,
in particular since the Fence Act (2006), the most iconic expression of such a frontier
is the Mexican-American border, where the high-tech control system cost more
than the total GDP of Burkina Faso in 2012.

This
article analyzes the maritime origins of this global wall, from 1880 to 1920, through
the eyes of the shipping companies that played a first-hand role in enacting,
enforcing and evading these borders. The business perspective on border
development gives a fresh look at the interplay of nationalism and
globalization, while at the same time highlighting regional and local
differences. Scholars have emphasized that laws excluding the Chinese
from white-settler nations developed a legal rationale for barring the entry of
certain groups, as well as the basic principles of border control and the
administrative organization to execute these. For the U.S., it is claimed
that that rhetoric and tools developed to exclude Asians were later copied to
greatly restrict the entry of Southern and Eastern Europeans and subsequently
mass migration as a whole.6 Adam McKeown thus concluded that standardized templates of migration
control had diffused globally by 1910.7 Yet few studies have analyzed these transfers explicitly, while most research
on migration to the U.S. is based on congressional sources that are restricted
to a top-down perspective. Some recent studies, by using
the case files of detained and deported migrants, provide a new, micro
perspective, highlighting the gap between enacting and enforcing migration laws.8 This
micro-perspective polarizes the history of rising modern barriers on human
mobility, turning it into a two-sided battle between the migrant and the state.

This study shows that other actors—especially
passenger transport companies—interposed themselves in determining the
flows of migrants. For the North Atlantic, several recent studies point
to the role of steam shipping companies in establishing the U.S. maritime
frontier, serving as go-betweens for migrants and the state.9 This article extends
these studies by exploring the connections, similarities, and differences
between Atlantic and Pacific maritime frontiers of the U.S., along with their
terrestrial ramifications. It deconstructs the notion of a U.S. border
regime rooted in excluding Chinese and then expanding to obstruct the influx of
other ethnic groups. Instead, this article argues that two different U.S.
border regimes took shape simultaneously on the Atlantic and the Pacific: I
thus question the existence of a U.S. national border-control system in the
years before 1920.

Enacting
the 'nationalization' of U.S. migration legislation: Atlantic versus Pacific

The
business perspective on migration policies of the nineteenth and
early-twentieth centuries permits reassessment of narrow, nation-based
historiographies. Migration history, initially studied in major receiving
countries, focused on policies of admission, integration, and assimilation from
a top-down, state-based perspective. Subsequent studies started to
integrate the agency of the migrants: they showed how migrants moved
across porous borders. This approach reversed the initial distortion in
the paradigm: it drew attention to the countries of departure, as their
policies influenced the travel and settlement of migrants, and their ties to
the home country. This revised paradigm allowed for the integration of
emigration and immigration into an interconnected process, enhancing our
understanding of transnational spaces in which individuals move and of the international
relations which shape state policies.

Still,
complementing immigration with an emigration perspective fails to grasp the
full scope of migration polices, in that the role of transit countries remains
discounted.10 Thus, many thousands of migrants left Russia, Austria-Hungary or
Scandinavia and then sailed from Germany or England to the U.S. As Donna Gabaccia
argues, migration policies may be better debated from a global rather than a
domestic perspective.11 This observation reveals that, during the long nineteenth century, many authorities
were more interested in regulating and attracting the business of transporting
migrants than they were concerned about who entered or left their boundaries. For
a long time, migration policies remained subordinate to trade and maritime
polices. The growing significance of trade and maritime policies influenced
the dynamics through which the modern global border system took shape—dynamics
in which the shipping companies claimed a key but overlooked role.

To
exemplify this point we can refer to what became known as remote border-control
policies. This refers to the principle that states seek to push migrant
controls back from their own terrestrial borders as far as possible and
preferably to the home country, before a person choses to migrate.12 Aristide
Zolberg emphasized that the first American Passenger Act (1819) pioneered the principle of selecting migrants before they left Europe
rather than on arrival in the United States. Concretely, policymakers
believed that imposing bigger space requirements for migrants on shipowners
would increase the cost of transportation and reduce the arrivals of the
poorest class. This hope proved illusory because, with the developing
patterns of "chain migration," the cost of relocation was not necessarily borne
by the individual migrant but often by family and friends who had moved
previously. Moreover, as the migrant developed into a lucrative commodity
on the North Atlantic, the competitive pressures for the migrant trade quickly
cancelled out any restrictive effects of the Passenger Act. By the time
the act came up for revision in 1840s, the European mass-migration movement was
booming. To help American shipowners claim a dominant position in the
lucrative market, the revised Passenger Act allowed American sailing ships to
build a third deck, hence increasing their capacity. As with its
pioneering predecessor, the British Passenger Act (1803), the main
concern of the American Passenger Act was not the regulation of who left or arrived, nor in
what conditions the migrants travelled. Instead, the act was to protect
national shipping interests against foreign competition. By the
mid-1850s, two thirds of the European migrants were brought in on American
boats.13

The
abolition of slave trade had reconfigured the triangular patterns of transatlantic
trade into two-directional ones, bringing timber, grain, cotton and tobacco
from the U.S. There was little cargo to ship back to America from Europe
until the mass migration movement developed. Migrants maximized profits and
strengthened shipowners' position on the market for American goods: shipowners
were now able, to quote lower prices for American goods than ships arriving
without passengers. This triggered a keen competition among shipowners,
ports, and government authorities, all seeking to lure migrants. In the 1830s, the Bremen Hanseatic authorities
successfully pioneered legislation directing migrants to certain routes and
ships, rather than checking who left or entered.14 Similar
legislation spread quickly to Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark,
bringing a defining impact on transatlantic migrant routes. The Belgian
case underlines the geopolitical interest in the trade. To consolidate
the recently obtained political independence (1830), rulers sought to promote
Belgium as a nodal point for international commerce. Through these trade relations,
the young nation wanted to create goodwill from states to defend its
independence against any challenges. They negotiated trade agreements and
spurred the development of maritime networks, especially on the North Atlantic.
Ties with the United States and the German states were judged essential
to fight off the Dutch, then considered as the "natural rival." Authorities
invested in infrastructure, in particular in rail and waterways improving the
connections with the hinterland. They negotiated reduced fares for Swiss
and German migrants to reach Antwerp. Consuls advertised the port as "the
emigration gateway to the New World," where laws and special officials
protected the migrants on their inland and overseas journey. The
government also subsidized the first transatlantic steam shipping line from
continental Europe to the U.S.15

In
most European countries the only restrictions limiting emigration by citizens concerned
the fulfillment of military duties for men. Aliens in transit to overseas
destinations could travel freely after passing minor controls on health and
financial means. The free movement of people was closely tied to the
liberalization of trade and the ideas of reciprocity. Up to World War I, migration
policies in Europe became steadily more linked to maritime polices: legislation
directed migrants to national ports and national shipping companies, for
economic but also military purposes. Ships flying under the
national flag could be used for naval purposes if conflicts arose. For instance, when in
1894 the German Reichstag established eastern border control stations to check
transatlantic migrants, the government entrusted management of the stations to
German steamship companies. The German companies thus gained a powerful
tool in directing the emerging eastern European migratory movement to their
ships instead of foreign lines. The initial drafts of the German emigration
law banned all foreign shipping lines from selling steamship tickets to German
migrants on German territory. Under diplomatic pressures, the 1897
law eventually limited the exclusion to Dutch companies.16 However,
the German shipping lines saw these policies backfire when other countries
adopted them. The case of Italy was very clear. Within eight years
of adopting its 1901 Emigration Law, Italy's shipping companies on the North
Atlantic rose from one to five, relying largely on Italian-built ships. The
proportion of Italians migrating aboard ships flying the national flag nearly
tripled, from 18% to 51%. This experience underlines the effectiveness of
using the migration stream to develop the national merchant marine.17 It
also shows that adopting national policies to regulate human mobility had
become generally accepted when global migration peaked.

In
the United States, however, migration and maritime policies became dissociated
during the 1850s, not least due to a problematic transition from sail to steam
shipping. Congress initially subsidized various transatlantic steamship
lines as part of the familiar policies to retain a dominant position on the
passenger market. Yet it lost this technological battle of national
prestige to Great Britain, allowing the latter to acquire a dominant position
on the migrant trade. The Civil War brought decline of the American
merchant marine. Authorities turned to protectionist maritime policies,
defending shipbuilders over shipowners and coastal shipping over long distance
maritime routes—thus withdrawing into continental isolation. Congress
did not expand the navy, and neither did it associate its military needs to the
developments of the merchant marine. As the major receiving country, the
U.S. had a privileged position from which to steer the immigrant flow to the
benefit of its merchant fleet, but the American Congress never did so. Regulations
to advantage American ships, such as charging an extra $50 head tax to immigrants
arriving on foreign ships, were never seriously considered. By the 1880s,
the share of the once-dominant American merchant marine on the North Atlantic had
fallen to 16%. Not even the Spanish-American war, which laid bare the
weakness of U.S. imperial pretensions, convinced Congress to build a strong
fleet.18

Let
us turn now, in this study of American maritime and migration policies, from the
main Atlantic route to the Pacific. The trans-Pacific migration route
opened much later and began to expand just as the American merchant marine entered
its Atlantic decline. American authorities turned to the Pacific to give
their last significant pre-World War I appropriation to long-distance shipping.
The subsidies given to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company (PMSS) allowed
the first transpacific steamship line to be opened under the stars and stripes
in the 1860s. Both trade and migration prospects were promising, as China
was forced to relax restrictions on the movement of goods and people. Pacific
competition was nearly inexistent, as compared to the Atlantic, where, by the
1870s, seventeen steam shipping companies operated 173 vessels in battling for
a share of the market. The PMSS had only to reckon with the Oriental and
Occidental Steamship Company (OOSC), also American. Each shipping initiative
was connected to powerful railroads and operated a dozen ships. However
the disassociation of maritime and migration policies by American authorities
quickly compromised the growth of both lines. Just as on the Atlantic,
steamship companies drew most revenues from third-class migrant transport,
followed by cabin class transport, goods and mail. Yet by the mid-1870s
the government restricted the Pacific migration movement by prohibiting the
entry of (Chinese) prostitutes, convicts, and coolies with the Page Act. This
restriction expanded strongly with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. The
companies managed to remain afloat because of the exceptions allowing travel
for merchants, diplomats, and students; in addition they benefited from
patterns of return migration, repeat migration, and illegal migration. But
the exclusion jeopardized any prospects for growth.19

These
laws marked a turning point in both American and global migration policies, as migration
would increasingly be considered as a matter of national sovereignty. Previously,
policymakers had showed reluctance to take unilateral decisions considering
migration. They believed migration to depend on international trade agreements,
fearing that restrictions on human mobility would obstruct the trade in goods. For
the Pacific, diplomats carefully renegotiated the Burlingame Treaty with China
before passing the Exclusion Act. This treaty generated the dual policy
of keeping an open door for transpacific trade while closing it for migrants,
with exceptions. On the Atlantic the gates remained open for both
migrants and commodities, even though Congress passed an 1882 general
immigration law directed at controlling transatlantic flows. It was open
to all migrants, with the exclusion of idiots, convicts, and people likely to
become a public charge; contract laborers were added to this list in 1884.20 When Belgian
authorities sought allies to protest against this act for infringing trade
agreements, it found no support. Officials of contacted
nations declined to protest, stating that it was a nation's own right to decide
who it let in or not.21 As
President Grover Cleveland put it in his State of the Union address, years later:
"The right to exclude any or all classes of aliens is an attribute of
sovereignty. It is a right asserted and, to a limited extent, enforced by
the United States, with the sanction of our highest court."22 By then
this notion was generally accepted among nations.

The
dichotomy between the Atlantic and Pacific immigration policies has been
attributed to the bigger racial differences of the Pacific newcomers,
generating stronger nativist pressures in the West. Conversely, in the
East, the industrialists' power to oppose restrictions among immigrants was
more effective. Amid these large firms, shipping companies had the most
direct interests at stake and took up a leading role to advocate liberal
migration policies. Several authors have argued that shipping interests influenced
the American Passenger Acts, regulating how people moved from the beginnings up
to their reviews in the 1850s, 1882 and 1907.23 The shipping interests weakened the implementation of the existing
measures by playing out the rivalry among Atlantic American ports to attract
passenger traffic. Until New York established itself as the nodal American
port for transatlantic travel, this strategy proved successful. In the
meantime, to prevent restrictive measures from being passed, shipping interests
stalled the adoption of new unilateral regulations by stressing the need for
international agreements. Foreign diplomats, in particular German and
British supporters of big shipping interests, made sure that negotiations
lingered and that the eventual 1882 Passenger Act resembled existing European
laws.

With
the shift to the "nationalization" of migration policies, however, shipping
interests realized that the "international trade" argument no longer stood. General
immigration laws now posed the biggest threat to their business. The
arguments used against restrictions shifted to a national rhetoric, underlining
the benefits of migration for the United States. But such a message was
undermined if expressed by an interest group consisting mainly of foreign
interests that gained financially from unrestricted migration. The
shipping interests turned to major railroad companies and industrialists to
support the campaigns, concentrating at first on Capitol Hill. Their main
goal was to retain a status quo, favoring the least possible regulation. Lobbyists
kept shipping lines posted on the debates, created goodwill among congressmen,
and used various strategies to prevent actions on immigration bills. If adoption
of immigration acts proved unavoidable, they provided amendments to weaken the
acts.24

The
only recognizable interest groups opposing the shipping lobby on the Atlantic
were labor unions. The labor unions were initially divided on the
immigration issue but, by the mid-1890s, all unions endorsed restrictions and
were joined by a rapidly growing nativist movement. The nativists, who
formed the Immigration Restriction League (IRL), gained momentum as migration
from new Eastern and Southern European regions overtook the traditional influx
from Northern and Western Europe. The IRL advocated a literacy test to
curb the new stream, while leaving the literate 'old-stock' flow undisturbed. If
adopted, this restriction threatened to reduce the traffic by thirty percent.

The shipping companies responded by closing
their ranks and redoubling their lobbying efforts. With the transition from sail to steam during the 1860s, the previously
fragmentized business had become concentrated in the hands of a limited number of
multi-national shipping companies. By the 1880s, the North Atlantic
shipping companies had assembled into three major shipping cartels: the British-Scandinavian, Continental, and Mediterranean
shipping conferences. The cartels
stimulated cooperation among the companies, improving the effectiveness of their
lobbying campaigns. Their top-down lobbying efforts in Washington
intensified and were complemented with bottom-up campaigns to influence public
opinion. Shipping companies hired journalists and academics to screen the
press and scientific journals, countering restrictionist stances with liberal
arguments. They built strong ties with the press, especially the foreign-language
papers, through advertising and because some newspaper owners sold ocean
passage tickets.25

As
the economic crisis of the mid-1890s led American employers to reduce their
support of pro-immigration campaigns, the shipping lobby turned to organizing
migrant groups to voice their claims. They funded and established ethnic
and cross-ethnic associations representing immigrant communities. In the
growing trust-busting climate, these associations gave the shipping companies a
much-needed mouthpiece. The well-established ties of the shipping
companies with the "old-stock" immigrant communities helps to explain why the
Irish and German communities initially obstructed the literacy test. Although
these ethnic groups would hardly be affected by these measures, the shipping
lines needed their political leverage, which newer immigrant communities could
not yet match.26 Immigrant communities that organized mass meetings were much more visible
to politicians and in the public eye than were the elitist restrictive interest
groups. The ethnic associations also became increasingly important for
top-down lobbying strategies in Washington, with their efforts coordinated by
the shipping companies. The impact of these lobbying campaigns is hard to
measure, yet it is a fact that a literacy test for immigrants passed one of the
houses of Congress seventeen times and endured four presidential vetoes between
1896 and 1917 before being enacted. The outbreak of World War, however,
totally disrupted the shipping lobby and destabilized the immigrant communities,
while patriotic nationalistic sentiments gave nativists wings.27

For
enactment of the Atlantic migration regime, shipping interests played an undeniable
role. For the Pacific, the absence of a similar lobbying power
accentuated the gap between the immigration regimes of the two oceanic basins. This
is not to say that the two American lines, OOSC and especially PMSS, lacked all
influence on Capitol Hill. That the PMSS knew the ropes for influencing
congressmen was illustrated by a mid-1870s corruption scandal about their state
subsidies.28 How much this scandal weakened the PMSS lobbying efforts against Chinese
exclusion remains to be explored. There is no indication that PMSS had close
ties with the much more significant Atlantic shipping lobby, dominated by
European companies. Pacific shipping interests, although based in the
U.S. and supported by big railroad corporations, had to contend with nativist
groups of a strength that was not to develop until later on the Atlantic. In
addition, the Pacific corporate interests lacked the leverage of established
migrant communities. Chinese immigrants, excluded from naturalized citizenship
until 1870, were only a fraction of the numbers of European migrant groups who
contested restrictions. Finally, the reciprocity of U.S. trade and
diplomatic relations with European countries, for which there was no real
equivalent in the Pacific, contributed to the divergence.

During
this period of accelerated globalization, the U.S. did not stand alone in
adopting national migration policies rooted in racial and ethnic prejudices. Adam
McKeown brilliantly described how the U.S. influenced and shared policies of
other white-settler nations to exclude Asians.29 Other studies have noted connections of American and European immigration
policies. For instance, the British Alien Act (1905) and the German
migration policies regarding Poles and Chinese highlight this interplay. These
studies underline that the "nationalization" of the migration policies came not
only from within the U.S. but was shaped by polices of other nations and by
actual and possible global migration patterns.30 These macro-level studies, however, are mainly based on a top-down state
perspective showing how the exclusionary rhetoric spread through the enactment
of laws. The micro-level studies comparing how these were interpreted and
enforced in local border control stations are yet to be completed.

Attention
to the shipping lobby underscores that third parties played an important role
in construing policy debates and influencing legislation. Dorothee Schneider
noted that the shipping lines also played an equally important role in enforcement.
European states gladly delegated de facto border control to transport
companies and their agents, forcing migrants to negotiate their exit with them
up to the 1930s.31 During this period, nation-states still in process of bureaucratization
relied greatly on third parties to implement their policies. What
Schneider labeled as "commercialization of border control," for exit, also
applies to policies of entry. By focusing on this role of shipping lines in
U.S. border enforcement, it will now be argued: 1) that during the "nationalization"
process of migration policies, the polarization between Atlantic and Pacific
regimes intensified rather than diminished; 2) that the exclusion of Europeans
through Quota Acts was much more a consequence of the Atlantic regime than of the
Pacific; and 3) that the unification of the two regimes that did occur was
two-directional. The focus on border enforcement also stresses the much-neglected
importance of the local within migration policies. Immigrant control
stations operated as isolated dots before being connected into a borderline
(and later a full blown fence), but always retained their specificities.

Enforcing
migration policies and border control regimes

The
maritime origins of most nineteenth-century U.S. immigration facilitated the concentration
of American border enforcement at key ports. New York and San Francisco attracted
ninety per cent of the registered transatlantic and transpacific immigrants respectively.
These became the laboratory of new enforcement measures that gradually
spread to other maritime ports of entry and terrestrial border-control stations.
Yet the gap between Pacific and Atlantic border regimes was reinforced
from the start not only because of diverging laws but also because the control
stations were entrusted to two different institutions. For both coasts,
the laws of 1882 underline how little consideration policymakers gave to the
enforcement of their laws. On the Pacific side, the Chinese Exclusion Act
was entrusted, without guidelines, to specialized customs officials who formed
the Chinese Bureau and worked closely with port authorities and health
officials. Previous measures such as the Page Act had been entrusted with carte blanche to the Hong Kong consuls. This remote-border-control
principle of stopping undesirables before the ship voyage was a long-pursued
ideal that encountered many practical impossibilities. The main problem
was that these controls undermined the authority of custom inspectors at the
gates to reject a migrant who previously had been approved by the consul. The
difficulties arising from the initial experiments with remote border control
pushed the American authorities to prioritize the enforcement at its own
terrestrial borders.32 On the Atlantic side, Congress took even less responsibility for the implementation
of the general immigration laws, leaving enforcement to state-government
initiatives already in place. Only in 1891, after mounting denunciations
of irregularities and lack of uniformity, did Congress create a federal
administration to implement the laws in main Atlantic ports. The
Immigration Bureau was headed by a commissioner general in Washington, who was
to supervise commissioners of immigration in charge of control stations staffed
with civil servants. Pacific control stations remained under the Bureau
of Customs and only came under the full purview of the Immigration Bureau in
1903. Only then were the general exclusion laws extended to apply as well
to the Chinese, to whom the special exclusion acts and inspection regime still
applied. The local administration of the laws on Chinese and other aliens
remained bifurcated until 1909.33 This created a dual administration of immigration laws, with little apparent
exchange of the methods used among control stations. The annual reports
of the commissioner general of immigration make clear that Chinese and later
Japanese immigration continued to be treated totally separately, with different
regimes of administration persisting well beyond the period under consideration.

HOW JOHN MAY DODGE THE EXCLUSION ACT.
A Chinese migrant is
kicked off the dock by Uncle Sam, but accompanying vignettes and text show how Chinese might enter the United States illegally. This
was linked to the entry of undesirable European immigrants: "As an industrious anarchist for
example. Or disguised as an humble Irishman. Let him come as an English
wife-hunter. If not these, let him come to us as a cup-challenger [in yacht
racing]. Or a peaceful, law-abiding Sicilian." Source: John S. Pughe (artist)
in Puck (July 12, 1905). Courtesy U.S. Library of Congress.

For
inspectors at the gates, enforcement was a learning-by-doing process. The
laws gave them a lot of margin for interpretation and for introducing new measures.
For instance, concepts such as "likely to become a public charge" (LPC)
or "merchants" remained undefined by law, leaving categorizing these to
inspectors. Commissioners of immigration liked this leverage, as Joseph
Senner (New York, 1893-1897) observed for the LPC-clause, as
it allowed inspectors to reject migrants they deemed undesirable without
requiring too much evidence.34 This ambiguity, however, reinforced the differences among immigrant
control stations. On the Atlantic, New York was known for its stricter
implementation of the laws as compared to the secondary ports of Baltimore,
Boston or Philadelphia. This knowledge circulated through shipping
companies, migrant agents, and migrant letters, who directed those passengers already
rejected or running the risk of exclusion to the secondary ports. For
shipping companies, this distinction was even used as one of the business
arguments to open a line to such secondary ports.35 On the
Pacific, San Francisco had a reputation similar to that of New York. Seattle
was the only port to have a direct shipping line for a period, whereas other
ports such as Los Angeles and Portland received occasional ships or indirect
traffic. Some individual immigrants were consciously guided by migrant
agents to secondary ports for the more lenient inspections. Sometimes
this was organized on a larger scale for certain groups that showed higher
risks to be deported, as for instance the migration of Syro-Lebanese through
Philadelphia.36

With the
imposition of legal barriers, the federal authorities were instantly faced with
illegal migration. This problem was reinforced by ever-increasing transport efficiency, which heightened the fluidity
of boundaries, drastically reducing the time and cost of smuggling. Meanwhile,
the U.S. federal government, by battling smuggling activities, greatly extended
its policing powers at home and abroad. According to Peter Andreas,
illicit flows of goods and people, together with the campaigns to police them,
shape and define the nation. In this view, the state creates smuggling,
but in turn smuggling remakes the state.37 The present study, while adopting Andreas's approach, argues in addition that
the state does not necessarily pursue uniform policies. The exchanges and
connections that linked the divergent Pacific and Atlantic migration-control regimes
appeared most visibly, however, in the course of fighting illicit migrant entry.
Early enforcement in the U.S. was facilitated by the fact that nearly all
immigration targeted by the laws had to cross major oceans. Nevertheless,
the U.S. could not prevent ships from disembarking, in neighboring countries,
passengers who sought to cross into American territory. Conversely, the
enforcement system created business opportunities that stimulated the opening
of shipping lines. The Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR) opened a steamship
service from Vancouver to Hong Kong in 1887. That the Canadian government
also introduced obstacles for the landing of Chinese laborers did not impede
the line's success: an important part of its clientele used the service as a
back door enabling immigration to the U.S.38

The
press denounced American port inspections as void if they were not enforced at
the land borders. Eastern papers reported that Irish and Germans of the
lowest classes abused the Canadian back door, criticisms which were echoed
about Chinese in the West. In theory, customs officials were supposed to
check for undesirable migrants; in practice they only checked luggage for
contraband.39 The sheer volume of European immigration, greatly exceeding that of
Chinese, made the problem more pressing on the Atlantic than the Pacific. A
small percentage of excluded migrants still represented an important flow, as
compared to the Pacific. Between 1853 and 1914 the registered migrant
traffic from the Pacific totaled 600,000 (60% Chinese, 30% Japanese, 10% other),
which amounted to a little over 2% of the 26,000,000 registered Atlantic
migrants.40 Moreover, there were many more established shipping lines
connecting Canada to Europe, facilitating indirect entry to the U.S. Passenger
shipping companies calling at Canadian ports were already competing for a share
of the American migrant market. Among shipping companies, the Beaver Line
was reputed to specialize in illegals, until it was taken over by the CPR in
1903. From this point the CPR became the first and only company to be
active in both oceans.41

Faced
with the immensity of the 4000-mile-long U.S.-Canadian border (not counting Alaska),
U.S. authorities took more than a decade to start remedying illegal migration
through the commercialization of border control and border diplomacy. The
diplomacy entailed imposing American laws on Canadian authorities, for instance
by imposing U.S. laws at Canadian ports of entry. Just as in the U.S.,
transport companies such as the CPR led the lobbying campaigns to prevent
Canadian immigration restrictions. They were therefore ill-disposed to
allowing American authorities to impose new restrictions. Nevertheless,
to avoid compromising the cross-border rail traffic of Canadian laborers, CPR
was forced into some concessions. In 1901, Canadian authorities granted American
inspectors the right to check all passengers who listed the U.S. as their final
destination when they arrived in Canada. Those who did not list a U.S.
destination could easily bypass the measure. The Immigration Bureau tried
to standardize inspections at main terrestrial cross-border points. Still,
every measure of the unwieldy administration was easily bypassed by the
flexible smuggling networks whose organization and business grew as the
barriers on migration at the gates became harsher. Border diplomacy bore some
fruits, as the Canadian Parliament copied certain American laws to avoid
getting stuck with U.S. rejects. Canada's efforts, however, centered more on
stimulating immigration rather than monitoring it, as laws remained less
restrictive and more leniently enforced: success of this policy brought dismay to
U.S. officials. For instance, despite the prohibitive Canadian head-taxes
of 500 dollars for Chinese laborers, three times as many registered Chinese
migrants arrived in Canada as arrived in the U.S. between 1908 and 1914. Some
made their way south, as did European illegals who drove smuggling activities to
new heights after the introduction of the U.S. Quota Acts during the 1920s. The
Canadian Chinese Exclusion Act (1923) trailed the U.S. version by more than
four decades, confirming the mixed success of border diplomacy.42 Only the
global economic crisis of the 1930s eventually forced Canada to become fully
integrated into the global wall that created frontier zones between the
industrialized nations and the peripheries.

The
mechanisms that came to consolidate present-day policies in one of today's most
contested frontier zones, the U.S. southern border, were also pioneered to
counter transpacific and transatlantic illegal migrants. This system
arose during the Porfiriato (1876-1911), the political regime which took
Mexico out of commercial isolation, opening up new
transatlantic and transpacific steamship connections. Through passenger
transport lines, authorities encouraged labor migration to spur new industries.
Apart from minor health checks, no immigration restrictions existed. Further,
mistrust towards the northern neighbour prevented the appointment of U.S.
inspectors at Mexican ports. As part of the periphery, Mexico did not buy
into U.S. border diplomacy and became attractive to smuggling networks, in
parallel to Canada. The same went for Cuba, which also functioned as an
important hub in this southern back door. The Gulf and the nearly 2000-mile-long
land border provided plenty of opportunities. Staffed with just over a
hundred inspectors, isolated immigrant border control stations at nodal transport
points remained powerless. The founding of the Border Patrol (1924)
changed little, and by that time Mexican journeymen had started substituting for
transoceanic migrant labourers.43 The results led gradually to today's militarization of the southern U.S. border
and the portraying of illegal immigration as one of the main threats
undermining the favoured U.S. position in the word-system. The language
used in the rhetoric suggests that the core countries are presently engaged in
a war to neutralize the porousness of the global frontier with the peripheries.

The
contrast of the U.S. southern and northern borders cannot be more sharply
illustrated than by the "Peace Arch Border Crossing" monument joining
Washington State to British Columbia. It carries the inscriptions "Children
of a common mother," "Brethren dwelling together in unity," and "May these gates never be
closed. " At the time of its construction in 1921, however, smuggling networks converged
at both the northern and southern land borders, bringing transatlantic and
transpacific migrants into the U.S. Little is yet known on the history of the
local border control stations and how they dealt with enforcing laws stemming
from two different immigration regimes. Research on local stations should
also shed more light on the extent to which they operated as isolated dots or were
connected with other stations to form a borderline, as generally perceived. The
re-opening of Ellis Island and Angel Island as museums has drawn new attention to
the maritime origins of migration enforcement practices at these main ports of
entry. The exhibits lack explicit comparisons but highlight the different
methods: the Pacific system of exclusion with exceptions vs. the Atlantic
system of inclusion with exceptions. The distinctions were dictated especially
by differences in the volume of immigration. New York welcomed major
passenger steamers daily, whereas for San Francisco the arrival of such vessels
was occasional. During the record year of 1907, 2700 immigrants were
processed daily at Ellis Island, a number which exceeds the average annual
admittance of all Chinese between 1883 and 1917. To avoid congestion, the
screening of migrants in New York was superficial, withholding only a small
percentage for further investigation. Conversely most Chinese underwent thorough
interrogations and cross-examination with witnesses.44

On
the east coast, the only papers identifying the entering migrants were the passenger
manifests provided by the shipping lines, until 1914. On the west coast,
various sorts of certificates and documents, often photographed, were required.
Such papers were to establish the eligibility to enter and also the right
to stay with the introduction of certificates of residence. Medical
inspections varied with ethnic groups and the distinctive diseases they were
assumed to carry: inspections of Chinese were commonly exhaustive. When
speaking in generalizing terms about the Pacific and especially for the Atlantic
it should always be borne in mind that race and gender played a crucial
differentiating role. Women in general and people from eastern and
southern Europe were scrutinized more thoroughly. How much racial
prejudices played a role depended a lot on the person in charge of the
immigration control station. When the puritan William Williams managed
Ellis Island, his disdain for the "racially inferior" was reflected in
increased detentions and deportations, in particular for eastern and southern
Europeans. Williams imposed new measures including financial tests and
health tests, putting great effort into rationalizing and standardizing
controls. While he marked the organization of Ellis Island, it remains
unclear to what extent his influence reached other border stations. Similar
impact of key administrators, notably John Wise and James Dunn, has also been
denoted for the Pacific. One difference was that, because of racial
prejudice, no Chinese-American would ever direct a control station, whereas
first- or second-generation European immigrants, such as Austrian-born Joseph
Senner (1893-1897) or English-born Robert Watchorn (1905-1909) led Ellis Island
with more lenient views.45 Williams' rationalizing efforts were supported by his superiors, Commissioners
General of Immigration such as Terence Powderly and Frank Sargent, who
centralized information, standardized categories and systemized examinations at the ports. These were increasingly racialized and reliant on eugenic
beliefs. Due to the personal impact of those in charge of control
stations and other key functions in the immigration administration, the
shipping lines lobbied with divided success for the appointment of moderates at
these positions.46

Besides
standardizing their own bureaucracy, government officials expanded the
responsibility of the shipping companies for bringing over undesirables. This
strategy of incorporating transport companies to compensate for the
shortcomings of the bureaucratic apparatus had been common practice from the
start. The extent to which shipping lines were an integrated part of
border enforcement is symbolized by the fact that, until the inauguration of
Angel Island (1910), all detained migrants to San Francisco were first held on
PMSS ships and later in a warehouse of the company.47 A good
working relationship benefited both parties, as the shipping lines tried to
create mutual goodwill to land as many passengers as possible, while the
immigration authorities depended on the lines to operate. Border
officials relied on the shipping lines both to spread and obtain information. Their
dependence on passenger manifests to acquire information on passengers has
already been pointed out. The Immigration Bureau used the shipping lines
to have the immigration laws posted in all offices of migrant agents in Europe
and the U.S. Changes in the implementation of the laws moved along the same
networks, as did ways to circumvent inspections. The head-tax, which was
levied per immigrant and used to fund the immigration administration, was
collected through the shipping lines. The companies lobbied to keep head-taxes
as low as possible, to limit the expansion of border enforcement, but could not
prevent rises with the passage of every new general immigration law (1893 $1,
1903 $2, 1907 $4, 1917 $8).48

Authorities
increased the involvement of shipping lines in particular by increasing their
financial responsibilities. Shipping companies risked fines of $100 for
failing to present third-class passengers for inspection. Fines of $10
were introduced for grave mistakes on the passenger manifest. This
improved the accuracy of the documents. This strategy was employed especially
to penalize companies for bringing over undesirables. In 1882, the
shipping lobby managed to strike out a clause billing the costs of
transportation of rejected and ejected migrants to the companies; in 1891 the
clause was adopted over their objections. Congress also billed the
shippers for the maintenance costs of all passengers detained at the control
stations. The transatlantic transportation cost, balancing at around $10,
kept this financial burden relatively low. What really cut into shipping
companies' profits were the hospital bills for migrants with "loathsome and
contagious" diseases, at daily rates between $1 and $3, depending on the illness.
This class of immigrants was added to the excluded list in 1891 and
gradually expanded to exclude polygamists, anarchists, prostitutes, procurers,
the insane, and epileptics. In particular, favus and trachoma (skin and
eye infections, respectively) inflated medical bills. Shipping companies
tried to recuperate these expenses from passengers or their families, though
with limited success. The companies tried to ship these cases back immediately,
yet immigrant authorities sometimes deferred deportations, to swell the bills
as a penalty for bringing them over. This practice was formalized into a
1903 law empowering immigrant authorities to fine shipping lines $100 for
bringing passengers with contagious diseases that should have been detected
before departure. The number of ejected migrants also swelled as the
period of deportability extended for arriving passengers falling under one of
the excluded categories. If deportees came from remote places, the cost
of rail transport to the port could weigh especially heavily.49 These
measures had repercussions well beyond America's gates, as shipping companies
hired extra doctors (including dermatologists and ophthalmologists) to screen
passengers before leaving Europe. The Dillingham Commission noted that
more migrants were being refused for medical reasons in Europe than in the U.S.
This combined success of "remoting" and "commercializing" border control
culminated in the Quota Acts (1920s), which put numerical limitations on
European migration by nationality, based on census data. As the quotas
were adopted with little consideration for enforcement, the Immigration Bureau
left the issue to the shipping companies, which risked fines for bringing over
excess passengers. Through the shipping cartels, the companies set up an
information system to keep track of the immigrant quotas per nationality before
departure, limiting the excess passengers to a minimum.50

Yet
shipping companies did not passively undergo the imposition of increased responsibilities:
they often challenged new measures in court. Test cases, financed jointly
by all cartel members, sometimes forced the U.S. immigration authorities to
revoke measures. More than immigrants themselves, the main forces contesting
border restrictions were the shipping companies bringing in immigrants. But
while restrictions on immigration cut into the shipping companies' profits, they
also created business opportunities. For instance, restrictions boosted
the transatlantic second-class service. This class cost between 25% and
50% more than third class and targeted better-off migrants and budget travelers.
Second-class passengers were initially absolved from passing through
border-control stations. In 1903 they were subjected to a very
superficial onboard screening, in which rejection rates were one tenth those
for third class. The Immigration Bureau repeatedly denounced this back door,
which remained open until World War I, mainly thanks to the shipping lobby. In
some cases shipping lines stimulated the passage of second class by giving fare
reductions to certain excluded groups, such as Mormons. Shipping
lines also assisted third-class passengers. The screenings at the ports
before departure were designed not so much to send back excludables as to
increase their chances of getting through border controls. The sick were
held in observation to be cured. The incurable chose other destinations,
alternative routes, or returned home.51

On the ship, the purser managed the passenger manifests to
track down excludables. He screened the answers and adapted those that might
raise suspicions. For instance, groups of single men having the same
final destination would be subject to suspicion as being contract labourers. Shipping
personnel coached these passengers on how to pass controls. Some
companies hired translators to prepare passengers on board for inspections. Before
arrival, all passengers were encouraged to wash up, to make the best possible
impression on inspectors. Names of passengers showing potential risks for
being detained were telegrammed to New York for special assistance upon arrival.
Relatives and friends were tracked down to send money, post bond, or appear
before the immigration authorities to facilitate entry of the travelers. The
shipping lines followed these cases, providing support to appeal decisions to
reject. If relatives or friends could not be traced, shipping companies contacted
charity associations to assist detainees. To generate good will among
immigration inspectors, the shipping lines sometimes gave them gifts, reduced
or free ocean passages. All these efforts were made while balancing the
fine line of maintaining good working relationships with the Immigration Bureau.
Opposing interests often placed shippers and inspectors at odds, but the
interdependence of their operations created a sound working relationship
between them. Thus, fines for violations were more often waived than
collected.52

Shipping companies stayed true to their first nature as carriers of human mobility rather than barriers, sometimes even beyond their own will:
stowaways were a growing phenomenon in the early twentieth century. Others
bypassed immigration controls by taking jobs as cattlemen or sailors on ships
and deserting upon arrival. This was also a notably cheaper way to
migrate. Some groups, such as the Norwegians traveling to Brooklyn, even
used this relocation strategy structurally—crossing as seamen, then
deserting to settle in the U.S. without passing through immigrant inspection. Not
before 1917 did the Immigration Bureau obtain any authority to intervene in the
landing of seamen.

Efforts
of the American immigration administration to close back doors ran into
constant difficulties. Its own measures often created loopholes to get in.
For instance, the imposition of all kinds of documentation to facilitate
the distinction between citizens and aliens created opportunities for
undesirable migrants to travel on American passports or falsify them. The
addition of a naturalization department to the Immigration Bureau in 1906, to
standardize the fragmentized state procedures, did not put an end to this
practice. This brings us back to the Pacific where the use of
personal documentation
to distinguish desirable from undesirable Chinese travelers was pioneered.
This documentation instantly became a valuable commodity and counterfeit or
altered documents quickly circulated. A common path for illicit entry was
by buying a legitimate entry permit held by a U.S. resident retiring and
returning to China. Also part of this phenomenon were the "paper sons,"
referring to those who fabricated familial identities to take advantage of the
loophole allowing immediate family members of Chinese merchants to immigrate. Photographs
introduced as objective evidence were quickly altered or substituted by illegal
entrants to construct false identities, further undermining the value of paper
documents as evidence.53

The
distinctive nature of the Pacific border regime created different means of
contesting it. For instance, cabin-class travel was not an option for
Chinese migrants, as they were scrutinized much more thoroughly on the Pacific.
Second-class passengers encountered even higher deportation rates than
the so-called Chinese steerage-class migrants. Deportation averaged about
10% of the arrivals on the Pacific, as compared with 1% on the Atlantic. To
contest rejections, Chinese appealed their cases in court—a right denied
to Europeans under the general immigration laws, which limited appeals within
the immigration administration. Courts allowed 90 percent of the Chinese appellants
to reverse the decision to reject. The Supreme Court started closing this
loophole around the turn of the century. By then, the Chinese Bureau had
started to deport Chinese under general immigration laws, in order to avoid long
court procedures. Some strategies of contesting borders on the Pacific were
similar than those on the Atlantic. Stowaways made their way illegally, even
though ships coming from China faced very strict controls. The loophole
of desertion by seamen, still neglected by scholars, is of interest because Chinese
seamen were a cheap and popular workforce on ships plying the Pacific and
beyond. Chinese crews were monitored closely by the authorities, for
instance by imposition of bonds to be paid by Chinese seamen seeking the right
to land and change ships. The system was far from waterproof, however: it
was open to change of identity among other Chinese looking for a trip back home.
The administrative energy and resources expended on limiting Asian
illegal migration enabled larger numbers of back-door entries for Europeans.54

Conclusion

To enable
a more complete comparison of Atlantic and Pacific migration, this research in
progress needs more archival research to fully uncover how shipping companies
positioned themselves between the migrant and the state for the Pacific. Research
on the Atlantic provides a solid base to work from and will shed new light on
this dual border regime. Here also further research, in particular in the
richly preserved immigration records of the U.S. National Archives, can provide
more information on the experience of these immigration control stations. How
much did these stations respond to local situations? To what extent were they
in contact with each other directly or indirectly through the central administration?
How much did the alleged rhetoric and gatekeeping measures to exclude Chinese
really transfer nationally and globally to exclude all migrants nationwide on
the ground, thus creating a frontier consolidating a certain world order? Should
we really envision U.S. border enforcement as a linear demarcation with
transfers of restrictionist rhetoric and gatekeeping tools mainly from west to
east or rather as isolated dots with limited connections in both directions at
best? This article suggests the latter and calls for more research that localizes
the roots of the modern-day border enforcement system to uncover how it spread
globally, consolidating the frontiers and increasing gaps between the core and
periphery. National frameworks remain central in this process, as
regulating human mobility became one of the catalysts to confirm national sovereignty
of the emerging nation states. Early migration policies were often more
concerned with how people moved than who migrated. As this article emphasizes,
the commercial interests behind mass transoceanic migration remain very much
overlooked in both migration and maritime history.

This
article places the transport companies at the heart of global mobility, where
they naturally belong. It calls for interposing these third parties into
the often-narrow view treating migration legislation and enforcement as a dual
dynamic, limited to the migrant and the state. Transport companies helped
shape the directions and volume of global, mass migration and played a central
role in the enactment, enforcement, and evasion of migration policies. The
Atlantic shipping lobby successfully opposed such U.S. immigration restrictions
as the literacy test, even as the American authorities gradually integrated
shipping companies into the mechanism to exclude undesirables. While to
some extent American authorities converted these carriers into barriers to
human mobility, in particular for unhealthy migrants, shipping lines stayed
true to their nature by turning restrictions into business opportunities,
stimulating migratory flows through back doors via Cuba, Canada and Mexico. As
Peter Andreas argues, however, most smuggling activities paralleled the routes
and methods of legal commerce, as illustrated by passenger use of second cabin
class to dodge immigrant inspections. Government officials understood that
measures to stimulate the legal flow of goods and people unintentionally spurred
smuggling while, at the same time, strict measures to crack down on illicit
traffic obstructed the legal flows.55 Exclusion of undesired migrants not only affected the entry of desired
migrants, but also of tourists, diplomats, businessmen, and even of goods
transported on the same routes. Throughout the period discussed here,
therefore, the American authorities showed reluctance to implement harsh
restrictive measures, moreso on the Atlantic than the Pacific, and thus created
many opportunities for illegal entry. Legal and illegal mobility clustered
around nodal transport points, such as New York and San Francisco, where modern
border and frontier zones arose. These transport nodes represent very
useful foci of analysis for world historians, as places of interaction among and
within scales, social spaces, and social systems. Focusing on such nodes in connection with
outlying control stations will give new insights on how frontiers take form and
shift and place some question marks on the militarization of borders.

Torsten
Feys obtained his PhD in history at the European University Institute (2008). He
is currently working as a post-doctoral researcher of the Research Foundation
Flanders (FWO) at the Department of History of Ghent University. His
research centers on the commercialization of migrant transport, border control,
illegal migrations, maritime and migration polices. His recently
published book, in the Research in Maritime History series, is The battle
for the Migrants: The introduction of steamships on the North-Atlantic and its
impact on the European exodus (2013). The research has also been translated to a
broader public through the long-standing collaboration with the Red Star Line
Museum (Antwerp) (http://www.ccc.ugent.be/torstenfeys). He may be reached at Torsten.Feys@UGent.be.

9 Per-Kristian Sebak, "A Transatlantic
Migratory Bypass: Scandinavian shipping companies and transmigration through
Scandinavia 1898-1929" (Unpublished dissertation: Bergen University, 2012);
Drew Keeling, The Business of Transatlantic Migration between Europe and the
United States, 1900–1914 (Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 2012); Torsten
Feys, The Battle for the Migrants: The introduction of steam-shipping on the
North-Atlantic and its impact on the European Exodus 1840-1914 (St. Johns:
IMEHA, 2013); Yukari Takai, "Circumnavigating Controls: Transborder Migration
of Asian-Origin Migrants during the Period of Exclusion," in Migrants and
Migration in Modern North America, eds. D. Hoerder and N. Faires (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2011), 313-332; and Robert Barde, Immigration at the
Golden Gate : passenger ships, exclusion, and Angel Island, (Westport:
Praeger, 2008).

18Jeffrey Safford, "The Decline
of the American Merchant Marine, 1850-1914: An Historiographical Appraisal," in Change and Adaptation in Maritime History, eds. L. Fischer and G. Panting (St. John's, Nfld.: IMEHA, 1985), 58-61,
79-81; Raymond Cohn, "The
Transition from Sail to Steam in Immigration to the United States," Journal
of Economic History 65, 2 (2005), 469-95; Jean Heffer, The United States
and the Pacific: History of a frontier (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2002), 84-88; John Perry, Facing West: Americans and the Opening
of the Pacific (Westport: Praeger, 1994), 115-17; Vivian Vale, The
American Peril: Challenge to Britain on the North Atlantic, 1901-04 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Feys, The
Battle, 60-66, 241-49; Keeling, The Business, passim.

20 Torsten Feys, "The Visible
Hand of shipping interests in American migration policies 1815–1914," Tijdschrift
voor Sociale en Economishce Geschiedenis 7, 1 (2010), 39-46; Benjamin
Klebaner, "State and the local immigration regulation in the U.S. before 1882," International Review of Social History 3, 2 (1958), 272-83; Zolberg, "The
Archaeology," 195-222.

25 Feys, "The Visible Hand,"
49-52; Torsten Feys, "Between the Public and the State:
the Shipping Lobby's use of the Public Opinion against U.S. Immigration
Restrictions 1882–1917" (forthcoming).

26 Ironically, German shipping interests
and the German-American community contributed greatly to enabling Polish-American
community (among others) to gain importance—at the same time that the
Reichstag adopted a restrictive immigration policy against the "Polonization" of
Germany's eastern borderlands.

27 Claudia Goldin, "The
Political Economy of Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1890-1921," in The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy,
eds. C. Goldin and G. Libecap (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 223-258; Feys, "The Visible Hand,"
52-53; Feys, "Between the Public and the State."

34 Joseph Senner, "How We Restrict
Immigration," North American Review 58, 4 (1894), 499; Feys, The
Battle, 228-29. This policy was still in force forty years later,
when President Herbert Hoover argued that there was no need for new laws to
restrict immigration because strict enforcement of the "likely to become a
public charge" clause would enable the influx to be easily regulated. Zolberg, "Matters
of State," 75. For the categorization of merchants, see McKeown, Melacholy
Order, 226-230.

42 McKeown, Melchonly Order, 200-210;
Ettinger, Imaginary Lines, 68-69, 79-83; N. Kelley and M. Trebilcock, The
Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2010), 65-122; B. Ramirez, Crossing the 49th
Parallel: Migration from Canada to the United States 1900–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 44-46; William Siener,
"Through the Back Door: Evading the Chinese Exclusion Act along the Niagara
Frontier 1900 to 1924," Journal of American Ethnic History 27, 4 (2008)
34-67.

43 Ettinger, Imaginary Lines, 60-159;
Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the "Illegal Alien" and the
Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge 2002), 152; Lee, At America's Gates, 63; McKeown, Melancholy Order, 143; Roberto Romero, The Chinese in
Mexico, 1882–1940 (Tucson: University
of Arizona Press, 2010), 3-57; Ruth Mandujano, "Transpacific Mexico: Encounters
with China and Japan in the age of steam 1867–1914" (Unpublished dissertation:
University of British Colombia, 2012).

44 Cannato, American Passage, 169,
300-301; Feys, "The Visible Hand," 58; Lee, At America's Gates, 87,
117-118; Anna Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America: Photography and the
Development of U.S. Immigration Policy (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2009), 1-27.

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